Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Fred's footprint: The silk road's dirty secret

The silk road to China has a dirty secret. Not of silk, but of cotton. The fabled cities on its route, Samarkand and Bukhara and the rest, are home to the world's largest state-run system of child labour. A system from which you and I benefit, almost every time we go shopping for clothes.

Back in April, I wrote here about my visit to the sweatshops of Bangladesh, where my jeans were made. While there, I asked the factory owners and traders where the cotton came from. Nobody would say. Back home, I asked retailers in the UK; they claimed not to know.

Then I got hold of a Bangladeshi rag-trade newsletter, and all became clear. Bangladesh ? the biggest supplier of clothes to high-street retailers across Europe ? gets half of its cotton from Uzbekistan.

I have been to Uzbekistan twice. It is an unpleasant place, an authoritarian former Soviet regime on the silk road, from where the British ambassador was messily removed a few years back for exposing human-rights abuses. And cotton is at the root of its many evils.

Uzbekistan empties its rivers to irrigate its cotton fields. That is why the Aral Sea, once the world's fourth largest inland sea, is drying up. Three years ago, I stood on the former shoreline and looked out across 100 kilometres of new, unexplored desert between me and the small saline sump that is all that remains of the sea.

All round the shore, towns and villages that once caught fish and grew crops are emptying. People with some of the highest rates of cancer in the world were fleeing a waterless land infested with salt and chemicals from the dried up sea bed.

This exploitation is not new. The cotton used to be used to make Red Army uniforms; now it makes glad rags for the west. And while fashion houses and chain stores are very keen to tell us every detail about the source of their fair-trade and organic cotton, they operate a "don't ask, don't tell" policy as regards the cotton for their rest of their clothing.

Thomas Reinhart, who runs the giant cotton trading company Paul Reinhart, told one British newspaper a couple of years ago that he had never heard of the use of child labour in the region. "We buy our cotton from government agencies and don't know what happens out in the fields". Well, in my view, he should.

I very much doubt if Child Labour existed in the former Soviet Union. The Soviet system was thoroughly opposed to all forms of exploitation despite all its mistakes. I'm not a marxist but I know that the west has always exaggerated the about the problems in the former Socialist countries. However, if Child Labour exists today in Uzbekistan I wouldn't be surprised.

In the soviet era it was the norm to send school kids to the fields in the summer for a few weeks. My class was sent to pick potatoes (in Belarus), my Mum collected flax (in Russia itself) and my ex-girlfriend collected cotton (in Uzbekistan). In our cases we spent 2-3 weeks doing this and I don't think it was so much for the profit of the cooperatives but more of camping trip. The idea, apparently, was to teach us the value of hard, manual labour and bring us closer together. To some extent it worked. We also go paid a little. But that was then...

I remember in the late 1940's in northern England (Tees-side)when us kids looked forward to a school break in autumn called 'potato week' when us kids, if we were lucky, got to ride out in open trucks to pick potatos in the country. We's get some pocket money and have a great time feeling a sense of adult usefulness.

Here in south-eastern Idaho our rural schools get out for two weeks or more for potatoes harvest each fall. This isn't state sponsored event and nobody is officially compelled to take part in the harvest. Some farm families just need the help. Why people try to shield children from the realities of life I do not understand.

I think the difference between the "work experience" of the earlier comments and what is described here is the commercial exploitation of the labour by the state - and the blind eye turned by those making money from it.

My wife is from Bukhara region and was forced to pick cotton for 6 years - and almost died from it once.

My wife and her brothers don?t have much nice to say about it. If I wasn?t overseas now I?d ask them to write their own personal accounts. But what i do know is that although she does talk about some good times with friends that she stole during breaks in the work, she mostly talks about the abhorrent food, awful living conditions, dirty drinking water (literally drinking from a muddy-brown runoff ditch for the entire stint), not being able to bathe for up to two months or more, hazing of students, harsh labor 7 days a week, 12 hours a day that left her hands bloody and her back in pain, and a general lack of care about the students. Her appendix burst during the cotton harvest and despite her pleas for help no one was willing to take her to a hospital. Were it not for the fact that an uncle happened to live in a village nearby-who had to fight with the administration-and borrowed a car to take her back to a hospital in Bukhara she would probably have died in that cotton field. Indeed, a student from her group did die from a neglected burst appendix the very next year. On top of all that, having to _owe_ money when everything is finished?

If one reads the reports by HM Inspectors of Schools in Queensland in the 1880s then one finds a common complaint by the Inspectors is that many young children in the schools north of Brisbane would be taken out of school for weeks on end to help their parents with the harvest. The Inspectors were in no doubt that the absent children's schooling was significantly affected and that it held back the schooling of the children who remained at school during harvest because the school teachers had to try to go back over the already covered ground when eventually the absentees returned.My wife teaches early primary in an indigenous school. She can confirm that lack of continuous school attendance is the thing that most holds back the progress in literacy and numeracy of young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children. Erratic school attendance and poor educational outcomes go hand in hand. If one wants a well-educated adult population then children need to attain high literacy levels early on. Whilst there is no doubt that home schooling can be extremely effective for the few, and some kids will teach themselves to read well just by picking up books and puzzling out the words, for high literacy levels early on compulsory attendance at school is essential.

With all due respect to the other commenters and their posts, aren't you all missing the point? Here is a country that is recklessly damaging the environment and exploiting their children, and the West is apparently doing nothing about it. There should be multi-lateral action to boycott Uzbek cotton derived products, an introduction of agreed internationally operated systems to fully trace and police the source of materials for goods and clothes, and strong political pressure (e.g. sanctions) be put on countries such as these to clean up their humand rights and environmental behaviour/ records. Write to your MP/ Governor/ Political representative today!

To those who evidently do not have the mental capacity to realise the difference between voluntary work and state sponsored child abuse for profit, and with slightly less respect for the posts of others than the previous commentator, I sincerely hope that among the effects which your idiocy causes, is a reduction in your ability to breed.

The real problem is the increased demands of an affluent middle and upper class population. Say we put extra regulations, sanctions, and oversight in place do you think anyone will pay for this at the retail end? I highly doubt it. What this would accomplish though is the creation of "paper work" jobs , men and women who; could be out making a living from the land, demanding less from the soil, the environment, and the other living creatures of this world, would instead be filling out forms and putting out "paper fires" instead of taking care of real problems. One reason these children harvest cotton is because the consumer class of 1st world nations get done with a days work and search out entertainment instead of learning how to take care of themselves and their needs yet continue to demand cheaper prices for everything. Its easy to step onto that podium and declare the injustice of the world but how many of us bought fresh fruits and vegetables shipped half way across the world this week? The true energy cost of shipping these items across the world for 1st world nations to consume is staggering and as we grow fat upon these luxuries how can we even begin to demand anything more of these people or the governments when we are doing so little ourselves.

Funny,I missed the time of the work trips with 2-3 years, but everyone who has been to one is very fond of the memory.

Yeah,I think most people do miss the point , but the reason is that somehow the article say it's due to the heritage of the Soviet time in Uzbekistan that children are being abused. And I don't think that's the reason. In Soviet time, those trips were really more for the moral (and I don't think they were optional). While those in Uzbekistan are more likely to be purely for economical reason. So, if you want people not to miss the point, just state your point in the right way.For many people Soviet is not equal to source of all evil. As for the children. You know, there are many important details.As the age of the children involved, if they get paid, if they get treated well and so on. Because if it was your kid in your house and you make him/her help you with the harvest or whatever, it wouldn't be child labor, right? Because you're helping them develop physical and mental qualities working on the fields. Not to mention that it's really healthy variety if they spend all their time on the PC anyway.

Then, let's be fair-we have to know the conditions under which those children work and how it affects them.

Personally, I might easily believe they're abusing those children, because moral is function of the economics of a country. And if the salary is $50 and families are starving, then I think it's somewhat "normal" to expect children to fight for their life also. Yes, it is bad, but don't forget, we have to see things from all the sides before judging.

Not that it makes a difference to the reality of those children, but let's face it-there are millions if not billions of starving or miserable or working children. If we want to help them, we shouldn't just blame their governments, we have to help raising the standard of their parents so that they shouldn't have to work.Otherwise, it's kind of hypocritical for me. http://tothefuturewithlove.blogspot.comhttp://denijane.blogspot.comhttp://www.tothefuturewithlove.net

And yeah,I've seen documentals about their sea and it's simply heartbreaking to see someone would do that. Unfortunately, UN are still to weak to act and without giving them an alternative, it would be a disaster anyway.

You have to come up with alternative methods before boycotting anyone. Uzbekistan is a very small country and its main reliance is on cotton export. I am not stating what he is doing is right, by far I detest the president of Uzb the most for he has tortured and oppresses his people beyond what we can understand. The oppression of media, civil rights is beyond understanding.

There is a big difference between child labour and parents who teach their children to do some manual labour. The parents love their children and do not let them starve or be exploited or die from illness. All forms of child labour around the world is without question child abuse. Unfortunately in countries like Iraq and Eygpt poor families are forced to send their children to work to support the household.

There is difference between child labor as abuse, and child labor as a form of survival. No one of us, from the position of our comfy lives, has the right to judge parents that have to use their children's labor in order to survive. Yes, it is abuse, children should grow getting the best of our society. Is it true in you country? I don't think so. There are many children in bad situations, there is no difference to this. And we all know many parents although they love their children still use their labour.Meaning, of course, they'll try not to harm their chilredn and will love them, but the work is work and sometimes it is hard.

The question for me is if this is government dictated or familly need dictated. Of it's directed by the government, then there can be some solution. In the other case, the only solution is to lift those people's quality of life. And no one of us will do that.

I was born in rural Missouri in 1943. Our school sessions were scheduled around picking cotton in the fall and manually chopping the weeds out of cotton in the spring.This lasted until the process became mechanized.

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